Elise Spiegel's report on "Morning Edition" this morning, about an the role of chance has me thinking about this concept of "alternate realities." Gilles Deleuze, in his book Cinema 2: The Time Image, talks about post-war cinema as representing a 'new' post-war relationship to time -- a relativity, in which multiple forms of time, past, present and future, as well as speculative time, such as non-real types of time such as dream and memory can co-exist, co-mingle and even become indistinguishable.
Perhaps, with our current collaboration with computer technologies, we are now seeing a kind of speculative time come to stand in for or even replace the formerly idiosyncratic, individual space of speculation. It's a 21st century iteration of speculation which becomes unhinged from the personal and moves into a space of networked, collaborative, machine control over subjectivity.
